The sacred cemetery on a hillside in Jerusalem is nearing capacity and could be full within 10 years, officials say.

JERUSALEM—For the past 3,000 years, Jewish families have been bringing their dead to the Mount of Olives cemetery.

A maze of hillside tombs, this graveyard is the holiest place for those in the Jewish faith to be laid to rest.

Many Jews believe that when the Messiah comes to Earth riding on a white donkey, the dead will rise from their graves and walk to the holy Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City.

From the Mount of Olives cemetery, that’s only a few hundred metres.

“Everyone in that cemetery is buried with their feet facing the Temple Mount so they come straight up and don’t even have to turn around. No one is going to get confused on the walk,” said Ira Rappaport, 67, who moved from New York to Israel 41 years ago and whose parents are buried in the cemetery.

“Some Jews also believe in a mystic interpretation of the scriptures that the dead roll over in the grave to get rid of their sins,” Rappaport said. “But because the land at the Mount of Olives is so pure, you don’t have to worry about that.”

Authorities have identified more than 150,000 burials here — the cemetery has been used for more than 3,000 years so there are surely other undiscovered plots — but administrators say new plots are becoming scarce.

In as few as 10 years, there will be no room for new graves, said Chananya Shachor, manager of the Jerusalem Burial Society, the largest of 13 societies that arrange funerals.

The Mount of Olives offers rare sanctuary from Jerusalem’s teeming city streets. One afternoon, the graveyard was marked by a smattering of mourners and a few tourists shuffled along narrow gaps in between tombs, peering at fading Hebrew script on weathered gravestones.

The Mount of Olives is said to date to the time of biblical kings and is home to the tombs of Christian prophets such as Zechariah, rabbis from the 15th century, and modern-day personalities such as former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

Before Israel captured East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967, Jordan used Mount of Olives tombstones as street markers, said rabbi Natan Ophir.

“Having that cemetery back is like being young and having a lover who lives far away and finally you are reunited with her,” Ophir said.

It costs as much as $22,500 for a plot at the Mount of Olives, which covers everything from a 15-minute graveside ceremony and burial shroud to the 1.2-metre-deep, 60-centimetre-wide plot itself.

Shachor, contemplating the end of burials on the Mount, recently opened a five-storey burial facility, in another part of Jerusalem, where bodies are entombed above the ground.

“We have to find other methods of burial or we won’t have anywhere in the country to walk with all the graves.”